David Miliband: A right decision, borne out of a wrong one

So, then, David Miliband – political colossus, or inconsequential footnote?  The greatest loss to British politics since the fall of Margaret Thatcher, or a failed leadership wannabe who will soon be forgotten?

There were plenty of opinions flying around this week in the wake of the South Shields MP’s shock decision to quit Parliament for a well-paid but scarcely high profile role running an international rescue charity in New York.

Predictably, it was his old mentors Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson who led the grief-fest, both expressing the hope that this would be but a temporary exile from which their protege would one day return in triumph.

Many Blairite cheerleaders in the media viewed Mr Miliband as so significant a figure that the ‘project’ would not survive his departure, though in truth it has been no more than a twitching corpse since his 2010 leadership election defeat.

The Conservative commentator Peter Oborne, writing in the Telegraph, took a rather different view of his career, however.

“Any detached judge has always been able to see that David Miliband was not front rank.  He is a hopeless public speaker and has never once expressed an original thought,” he wrote.

Oborne contrasted Mr Miliband’s “cosmic sulk” after losing the Labour leadership to his brother Ed with Denis Healey’s loyal service under Michael Foot after a similarly unexpected setback in 1980.

The difference between them, he argued, was hinterland:  Healey, who fought with distinction in the Second World War, knew that losing the leadership was a trivial matter by comparison, whereas Miliband, who has spent his entire adult life in politics, had no such perspective.

My own view for what it’s worth is that David Miliband was not a complete politician, but nevertheless still the best on offer at the time Labour was choosing a successor to Gordon Brown in 2010.

Oborne is right to point out that he certainly wasn’t in the front rank as an orator, but this didn’t prevent John Major reaching Number Ten and staying there for nearly seven years.

Where he was more lacking was in his tactical acumen – as was seen in his various hamfisted attempts to set out a distinctive New Labour policy agenda during the Gordon Brown years.

If these were covert leadership bids, they were spectacularly unsuccessful ones.  If they weren’t, he should have taken much more care to ensure they were not interpreted as such.

In his favour, he was certainly one of the brainiest people operating in public life over the past decade or so and also, it has to be said, one of the nicest.

As regular readers of this column will know, I was never a huge fan of New Labour, but with David it never spilled over into personal acrimony in the way it occasionally did with some of his North East Labour colleagues.

But it was not so much his cleverness or niceness that made him the best candidate to lead the party in 2010, it was simply that he was the party’s most popular and well-known figure among the wider public.

It may seem obvious that a party wanting to return to power at the earliest opportunity should take note of what the public thinks when choosing a leader, but actually they seldom do, as both Mr Healey and later Ken Clarke also found to their cost.

In the end, it is this very popularity that has forced Mr Miliband to the point where he now feels Labour’s chances of winning the next election would be better if he were 3,000 miles away from Westminster.

It was this, coupled with the peculiar dynamics of Labour’s electoral college which showed he was also the most popular choice of Labour activists and MPs, which would always prompt those comparisons with his brother’s performance.

Has he taken the right decision?  For himself, for his brother, and for the Labour Party, almost certainly yes.

But that still doesn’t alter the fact that the Labour Party made the wrong one when it decided to pass him over.

Ed should think twice before he buries New Labour

Within hours of Ed Miliband's victory in the Labour leadership election last Saturday, friends of Tony Blair let it be known that the former PM regarded the result as a "disaster."

It was certainly pretty disastrous for Tony Blair. His ill-judged intervention in the contest, suggesting that any departure from New Labour would consign the party to the wilderness, appears to have spectacularly backfired.

Offered the chance to choose a Blairite continuity candidate in David Miliband, the comrades opted instead for someone who has spent most of his career as an adviser to Gordon Brown.

Mr Blair's autobiography may have topped the best-seller charts. But it has lost him any lingering influence he may have had over his old party.

But if this week's conference in Manchester was a disaster for the Blairites, how was it for the party as a whole?

Well, on this point, I'm afraid I find myself in rare agreement with the former Prime Minister.

Had David won, Labour would have been right back in the game. Unlike his younger brother, he is a man who is ready to be Prime Minister now, and his election would instantly have struck fear into the coalition.

Instead - and not for the first time in its history - the party has opted to eschew the easy route back to power in favour of the long, hard road.

To my mind, there are three principal reasons why Ed's victory may ultimately come to be seen as a bad day's work for the party.

The first is nothing to do with the qualities of Ed or David, but with the flawed system that enabled Ed to come out on top despite winning fewer votes from both party members and MPs.

Much has already been written about the dangers of Ed being seen to be in the "pockets" of the union bosses, and like many Labour leaders before him, he will have to work hard to tackle that perception.

To me, the bigger problem is not that the unions got their man, but that the party members didn't, creating an issue of legitimacy that Ed will struggle to address.

Secondly, there is Ed himself. He was right in his speech on Tuesday to try to draw a line under some of the issues which have caused Labour to suffer such a catastrophic loss of trust, and the 'Red Ed' jibes will soon be shown to be ludicrous.

But for all his personal ruthlessness in fighting his elder brother for the party leadership – and in despatching Nick Brown from the job of Chief Whip - he still comes across as rather earnest and well-meaning.

For me, though, the biggest danger for Ed is that, in displaying such ruthlessness in pursuit of the top job, he may have sown the seeds of his own downfall.

It is not just that in order to win the leadership he had to humiliate his elder brother and force him out of frontline politics, but that he also had to trash the entire New Labour brand.

Yes, there were things New Labour got wrong. It did become "fixed in its own certainties" as Ed said on Tuesday. The Blairites became, like Tony Crosland, revisionists who stopped revising.

And as the North-East knows only too well, it clearly failed to balance the interests of its traditional supporters against those of 'aspirational' voters.

But the essential lesson of New Labour – that to win, the party needs to reach out beyond its ideological comfort zone - is one Ed Miliband ignores at his peril.

And I am not alone in wondering whether in declaring New Labour 'dead,' he is not also in danger of writing his own political obituary.

Balls holds the key

Politics has seen many changes over the past couple of decades - but if there is one thing that has changed out of all recognition, it is the science of opinion polling.

I have been in this game just about long enough to remember the infamous BBC exit poll in 1987 predicting a hung Parliament. Mrs Thatcher's Tories won a 102-seat majority.

By contrast, this year's exit poll - also predicting a hung Parliament - was very nearly spot-on, not just in terms of the overall outcome but also in terms of the number of seats won by each party.

But if most elections are becoming easier to predict, Labour leadership election are surely the exception that proves the rule.

There are two fairly straightforward reasons for this. Firstly, the single transferable voting system, which usually means that contests are decided on voters' second and sometimes even third preferences.

Secondly, the make-up of Labour's electoral college, comprising MPs, trade unions, and party members, which makes it nigh-on impossible to conduct a meaningful opinion poll.

So the widespread expectation that South Shields MP David Miliband will be crowned as Gordon Brown's successor later this month needs to be taken, at the very least, with a small pinch of salt.

While the Shadow Foreign Secretary certainly has the most support among MPs, and probably among party members, no-one quite knows what the union ballots will come up with, or how important those second preferences will prove to be.

If anyone is in any doubt about this, they only have to look at what happened in the party's deputy leadership election in 2007, when Alan Johnson and Hilary Benn were seen as favourites by the pundits.

They completely underestimated the level of support among the grassroots for Harriet Harman and Jon Cruddas, whose second preference votes ultimately won Ms Harman the job.

That said, leadership elections are not the same as deputy leadership elections where you might feel more able to vote for someone you like the sound of, without necessarily worrying about whether they are capable of winning a general election.

There is a good argument for saying that if the same six candidates as contested the deputy leadership in 2007 had been contesting the leadership, Mr Johnson would have won.

The conventional wisdom in this election has been that Ed Miliband is everyone's second favourite candidate, and that if David is not sufficiently far enough ahead on first preferences, he risks being overhauled by his brother in the latter stages.

The key to it, as with the 2007 deputy leadership election, will be what happens to the second preferences of the third-placed candidate.

Following his strong performance in bashing the coalition, and showing real fighting qualities over the course of the campaign, I think this will in all likelihood be Ed Balls.

I am quite sure this is why talk of a 'pact' under which Mr Balls would become David Miliband's Shadow Chancellor has been doing the rounds over the past couple of weeks.

As it is, I am not sure there ever was such a pact or whether it would even be deliverable.

Mr Balls and the elder Miliband do not appear to share the same views about the importance of tackling the deficit vis-à-vis the need for economic growth, and that may make his appointment as Shadow Chancellor somewhat problematical.

Either way, by my reckoning Ed Miliband will probably need to win at least three fifths of Mr Balls' transfers in order to pip his brother to the post.

My hunch is that he won't, and that it will indeed be David wearing the crown a fortnight tomorrow.

For PM, it has to be DM

No leadership election occurs in a political vacuum. For good or ill, the current race for the leadership of the Labour Party will invariably be shaped in part by the context in which it is taking place.

Like it or not, it is the Blair-Brown years, and their ultimately shattering denouement in the general election defeat of 6 May, which provide the inescapable backdrop to this contest.

For at least one of the candidates, Ed Balls, that defeat already looks likely to have dealt a terminal blow to his leadership aspirations.

For all his pugnacious qualities - none of the candidates have landed as many blows on the Lib-Con coalition as he has - the party was never going to replace the defeated Gordon Brown with, well, Gordon Brown Mark II.

But if this has been a difficult election in which to be a Brownite - all the candidates have been anxious to distance themselves to a greater or lesser degree from the former Prime Minister - being seen as a Blairite is not much of a recommendation either.

If by publishing his memoirs in the week the leadership ballot papers went out, Tony Blair hoped to influence the contest in favour of his protege David Miliband, it only goes to show how delusional he has become.

Mr Blair's account of his 'Journey' is already a bestseller, but many Labour members will be aghast at his decision to kick Mr Brown when he is down while simultaneously refusing to criticise Prime Minister David Cameron.

Then again, why would he, since he too clearly believes that the coalition is a Blairite continuity administration, doing exactly the things he would have done had he not been thwarted by nasty old Gordon.

So far from boosting the elder Miliband's candidature, the book looks likely to provoke a backlash against Mr Blair which could well harm the Shadow Foreign Secretary.

But in my view, that would be a shame, because, aside from all the factionalism, David Miliband is the best qualified candidate to take Labour back into government.

I have to confess that at the outset of this contest, I was leaning more towards Andy Burnham, which would have been the first time Durham North MP Kevan Jones and I had agreed about anything.

But while Mr Burnham is clearly the candidate most attuned to the needs of the North, his oddly tribal, Old Labour-ish campaign has seemed at odds with the 'new politics' of co-operation and coalition.

Of the other candidates, Ed Balls has already been dealt with, Diane Abbot would clearly take Labour back to irrelevance, while I wonder whether Ed Miliband is really ready for the top job.

I like a lot of what he has had to say about the need for Labour to regain its values before it can think of regaining power, and the 'Red Ed' jibes from the Blairite camp are self-evidently ludicrous.

For me, Ed's problem is not his politics, but the fact that he comes across as rather well-meaning and naive - a nice guy, an original thinker even, but not quite tough enough to be leader - and maybe PM - just yet.

By contrast, the one quality his elder brother possesses above all is that, having already held a major office of state, you can easily imagine him as Prime Minister now.

Mr Blair was at pains in his TV interview with Andrew Marr on Wednesday to stress that the South Shields MP is his own man, and that is one thing he was right about.

As a North-East Blairite, he could easily have got sucked into the silly tribalism that affected some of his former parliamentary colleagues in the region who saw any criticism of their beloved leader as a betrayal, but to his credit he never did.

I have no doubt at all that if he wins, David's first priority will be to unite the party and draw a line under the feuding once and for all.

But will he win? That is the question to which I will turn my attentions in next week's column.

How open is the Labour Party to persuasion?

Cross-posted from Political Betting.

Early on in the Labour leadership battle, Mike [Smithson] drew what I thought was potentially a good analogy between David Cameron’s succesful campaign for the Tory leadership in 2005 and Andy Burnham’s candidature for Labour this time round.

Young Burnham, he surmised, could turn out to be the Cameron of this campaign - a relative unknown coming from behind to win while better-known front-runners faltered.

As it is, Burnham has hardly achieved lift-off. He has fought an oddly Old Labour sort of campaign, of which the last straw - no pun intended, Jack - has been his opposition to the proposed AV referendum which Labour supported in its manifesto.

But that’s not my main point. My question is: is there actually room in this race for any of the candidates to ‘do a Cameron,’ or is the nature of the contest such that the prospect of anyone springing a surprise is already closed-off?

One major difference between this and the Tories’ 2005 race is that the candidates are not being subjected to the pressure-cauldron of a party conference hustings.

When the Tories did this, it enabled them to weed-out a front-runner in David Davis who, whatever his other virtues, was clearly incapable of making a decent platform speech, in favour of someone who wowed his audience by speaking without notes.

Another key difference is the nature of the two parties. As I have pointed out on my own blog, the Tories are historically much more open to making unexpected choices of leader - Margaret Thatcher over Ted Heath in ‘75, William Hague over Ken Clarke in ‘97, Iain Duncan Smith over the same opponent in 2001.

Labour, by contrast, almost always sticks to the front-runner, sometimes because the front-runner is clearly the best candidate (Neil Kinnock in 1983, Tony Blair in 1994) but sometimes out of sentimentality or a resdual belief in ‘Buggins’ Turn.’

My hunch is that most of Labour’s electorate has already made its mind up about this election, and it is now a contest between the brothers. While it is not yet clear which of them will win, it is clear that one of them will.

I’m not sure what current prices are available on Burnham, Ed Balls and Diane Abbott, but whatever they are, my candid advice to PB aficionados would be: ignore them.

Labour's would-be leaders must not stand for this

And so at last the real cutting begins. A new hospital in Hartlepool. A business loan that would have guaranteed hundreds of jobs in Sheffield. A huge modernisation programme for libraries.

All gone in a flash, along with another £2bn worth of projects apparently approved by Labour in its last few months in office, though in the case of the hospital, it seems to have been in the pipeline for rather longer than that.

And at last, too, some real passion from Labour in opposing the Con-Lib coalition's programme of cutbacks - both from Liam Byrne on the floor of the House on Thursday, and later from David Miliband in the BBC studios.

The defeated party finally found its voice as Mr Byrne, the man who came close to making it a laughing stock with his 'sorry, there's no more money' note to his successor, managed to redeem his own somewhat battered reputation.
The shadow chief secretary told Lib Dem opposite number Danny Alexander: "The country....will be aghast at your attack on jobs, your attack on construction workers, your attack on the industries of the future and the cancellation of a hospital.

"In five minutes this afternoon you have reversed three years of Liberal Democratic policy of which you were the principal author. What a moment of abject humiliation."

Mr Miliband went even further, when invited onto the BBC's Newsnight that evening to discuss the cuts - in particular the cancellation of the £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters.

"We were looking to facilitate a genuine industrial revolution in the North of England. It's been thrown away by an act of gratuitous economic vandalism," he said.

The sense of outrage that finally welled-up from senior Labour politicians this week has been long brewing.

As I wrote last week, the government is making a very determined effort to construct a political narrative in which "irresponsible" Labour is blamed for wrecking the economy and leaving a mess for the coalition to clear up.

It is, however, in danger of gilding the lily - just as New Labour's own 'repeat messaging' of its achievements ultimately caused people to disbelieve everything it said.

Indeed, the new Office for Budget Responsibility this week found that, far from being irresponsible, previous Chancellor Alistair Darling had been too cautious in his borrowing forecasts, and that it will actually be £22bn lower over the next five years.


Some of Labour's leadership contenders have appeared reluctant to defend the previous government's record, two of them even claiming they were against the Iraq War even though they were government advisers at the time.

But rather than let the coalition traduce its economic legacy and use that as a justification for cuts, Labour needs to take the fight to its opponents.

Sure, the Brown government was not perfect. But it was doing no more than following classic Keynesian economic theory - that you stimulate spending to achieve recovery, then wait for tax revenues to eat into the deficit before making cuts.

I for one am pleased that at least one of the contenders is prepared to defend that perfectly respectable position.

One of the main criticisms against David Miliband as a leadership candidate has been that he is simply too cerebral, that he lacks the moral passion to energise a movement which Harold Wilson rightly termed "a moral crusade or nothing."

Well, on Thursday night, we saw the South Shields MP try to answer some of those criticisms.

Some called his Newsnight performance a "rant." Some even questioned his fitness for office. But for me, it was no more than a recognition of one of the iron laws of politics.

Namely, that before you can be Prime Minister, you have first to make a success of being Leader of the Opposition.

Miliband Major has the Big Mo

The Con-Lib coalition overcame its first major crisis over the past week with the resignation of the Treasury Chief Secretary David Laws after what must be the shortest Cabinet career on record.

Doubtless it is a huge loss to the government. Mr Laws was easily the most popular Lib Dem on the Tory benches, and as such was a vital bridge between the two governing parties.

That said, it says a lot for the strength of David Cameron and Nick Clegg's alliance that Mr Laws' shock departure, after revelations about his expense claims and his private life, failed to sever it.

Although there do appear to have been some behind-the-scenes disagreements about how the resignation should be managed – and how Mr Laws should be replaced – in public at least the coalition managed to maintain a united front.

Debate will linger on over whether Mr Laws was right to resign, although my own feelings are that he made the right call in judging that he could not be the man to oversee expenditure cuts having claimed expenses he was not entitled to.

But after a month of writing mainly about the coalition, I'm going to focus instead this week at what is happening on the opposite side of the House.

Granted, Labour's leadership race hasn't exactly sprung into life yet, with most of the better-known contenders ruling themselves out on the grounds of age and the current front-runners a monochrome set of white, middle-class former policy wonks.

But with a swift return to power a real possibility for Labour if the coalition were to hit the buffers, the choice is certainly not without significance.

Many Labour activists in the North-East will doubtless be hoping South Shields MP David Miliband can emulate Tony Blair and Ramsay Macdonald and become the third party leader to hold a seat in the region.

History is certainly on his side. While the Tories are often inclined to favour the unexpected in their choice of leader, Labour almost invariably opts for the most 'obvious' candidate.

It usually pays off, too. Harold Wilson over George Brown in 1963, Jim Callaghan over Michael Foot in 1976, John Smith over Bryan Gould in 1992 and Tony Blair over Margaret Beckett in 1994 were all the right choices.

As if to prove the point, on the one occasion on which Labour passed over the obvious successor - choosing Mr Foot over Denis Healey in 1981 – it proved a disaster.

Support for the six candidates among the North-East's 25 Labour MPs is fairly evenly spread.

David Miliband currently has six nominations from the region, Ed Balls five, Ed Miliband four, and the other three candidates one each.

While left-wingers Diane Abbott and John McDonnell appear unlikely to get the 33 nominations necessary to join Mr Balls and the Milibands on the ballot paper, former health secretary Andy Burnham still might.

The one North-East MP backing him thus far is Durham North's Kevan Jones, who is not a bad person to have on your side in an internal party election.

Ed Miliband began the contest looking handily-placed, potentially the most open to fresh ideas and the least weighed-down by previous baggage. Mr Balls meanwhile is a proven campaigner who is sure to get big support from the unions.

But it is the elder Miliband who appears to have that crucial electoral asset: momentum.

Most of the heavyweights from the Brown Cabinet have lined-up behind him and as well as being the most experienced of the candidates, he both looks and sounds the most Prime Ministerial.

It is early days – but the Labour leadership is already looking like it is David Miliband's to lose.

The old politics is back

Is politics returning to normal? Even before the government's pettyfogging decision to boycott Question Time over, of all things, the presence of Bad Al Campbell on the panel, the signs were there. Here's today's Journal column.

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After the unchartered waters of the post-election period and the initial excitement of the Lib-Con coalition deal, the political events of the past week had a reassuringly familiar feel to them.

A Conservative Chancellor unveiled a swingeing package of spending cuts. Labour frontbenchers queued up to attack them.

Meanwhile a Conservative Education Secretary unveiled plans to reduce the role of local authorities in schools – as Labour accused him of trying to recreate a two-tier education system.

So much for the 'new politics.' This was just like old times.

For the North-East, the new political era is already carrying unwelcome echoes of the Thatcher-Major years.

National newspapers have once again started to carry long features on the region's plight, and how its relatively high proportion of public sector jobs will leave it vulnerable to the spending cutbacks. Tell us something we don't know.

The one bright star on the horizon is that ministers have bowed to the demands of this newspaper among others to retain a region-wide economic body.

Communities secretary Eric Pickles moreorless confirmed on Wednesday that this would be the existing job-creation agency One NorthEast, albeit in a radically slimmed-down form.

But though some will doubtless bemoan the loss of Labour's child trust funds, there is a consensus of sorts over the cuts, the only argument being whether they should have happened now or later.

Michael Gove's education proposals - a re-run of the Major government's grant-maintained schools initiative - are however likely to be far more controversial.

By opening the way to thousands of schools to become 'academies,' the Tories' real aim appears to be to further neuter the role of local government.

For all the talk of 'localism,' all this will result in is more and more schools being directly-funded – and thus ultimately controlled – from the centre.

Labour activists, many of whom are teachers and many more of whom work in local government, will hate this measure probably more than any other to emerge from the coalition so far.

In terms of the Labour leadership contest, it ought to play into the hands of the former children's secretary, Ed Balls, who led the attack on it this week in his usual combative style.

Nevertheless Mr Balls remains very much an outsider in the race which thus far looks set to be a contest between the Miliband brothers, David and Ed.

The election of South Shields MP David as Labour leader would, at least, be some compensation for the fact that the North-East is the only region without a single MP in the government.

Of all the many vignettes that have emerged from that strange five-day post-election limbo when no-one quite knew who had won, one of the most intriguing concerns a 3am conversation between Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown.

The former Lib Dem leader was apparently begging his old friend to broker a Lib-Lab coalition and finally realise their dream of a new 'progressive alliance.'

But Mr Blair said no, it was time Labour went into opposition, arguing that if it clung on to power this time round, it would pay a terrible price at the next election.

As the initial euphoria around the coalition subsides, and the harsh reality of its programme starts to bite, it is looking increasingly like the right judgment call.

Wanted: More candidates

I have to confess to being decidedly underwhelmed thus far by the Labour leadership election. Aside from the fact that many of the best candidates have ruled themselves out of the running on the grounds of age - always a depressing state of affairs for those of us who are nearer 50 than 40 - the distinctly monochrome nature of the four leading candidates, all white middle-class males who moved into important positions in government on the back of having once been junior research assistants to Gordon Brown or Tony Blair, leaves little to get excited about.

Of the four - I am discounting Diane Abbott and John McDonnell as no-hopers - the one that has so far talked the most sense is Andy Burnham. He at least seems to have some understanding of the Labour Party's roots, and a coherent story to tell about how it managed to lose touch with its natural supporters over recent years. I have also, in the past two days, been impressed by Ed Balls: the new government's divisive new education reforms, a throwback to the mid-1990s mania for grant-maintained status, will surely give him a platform from which to rally support.

Of the Miliblands, there is much less positive to be said from my point of view. To tell the truth, I would not be unhappy with either of them as leader, and David's so-called 'Blairite' credentials - a fatal drawback if genuine - have always been seriously overplayed in my view. But I wonder whether either of them are quite combative enough for the role at a time when the Con-Lib coalition is threatening to carry all before it.

Certainly Harriet Harman made a good stab at puncturing David Cameron's growing self-confidence this week, and I still don't think it is entirely outside the bounds of possibility that she could come into the race. For one, I don't think she would be entirely happy to see Abbott carrying the torch for Labour's wimmin. For another, I think it's very noticeable that some of the key Brownites who were behind her deputy leadership campaign - the likes of Nick Brown and Kevan Jones - have yet to declare for any of the other candidates.

What this is all leading up to is that, to my mind, the field is currently way too narrow. I am hugely disappointed that Yvette Cooper has decided not to stand - if brother can stand against brother, then why not wife against husband? - but I do understand her reasons. No such considerations apply, however, to the other great absentee from the race - Ben Bradshaw.

He was an experienced and successful minister. He was not clearly associated with either Brown or Blair but was regarded as having been loyal to both men. He has an interesting personal backstory that resonates with 21st century Britain. He is good-looking, articulate and good on TV. Perhaps most importantly of all, he has had a life outside the Westminster goldfish bowl and a successful career in the real world. Why is he not standing?